


Fleeting

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: The Carnival Is Over - The Seekers (Song)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-07-10 19:25:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7002274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a little girl in the long grass, about Pierrot's age: shy, trying to hide amongst the stalks and dandelion puffs, but with bright staring eyes like a tiger. She had postbox-red trainers on, beads of every colour threaded onto some of her curls, and polkadot patchwork pockets on her denim dungarees. Next to her Pierrot felt like a ghost: incorporeal, at risk of fading away on the breath of the breeze. Her costume felt like a big white smudge of nothingness next to a living breathing rainbow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fleeting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sweetcarolanne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetcarolanne/gifts).



> Dear sweetcarolanne - really hope you enjoy! I loved your idea of a Pierrot being a girl ♥

There was a little girl in the long grass, about Pierrot's age: shy, trying to hide amongst the stalks and dandelion puffs, but with bright staring eyes like a tiger. She had postbox-red trainers on, beads of every colour threaded onto some of her curls, and polkadot patchwork pockets on her denim dungarees. Next to her Pierrot felt like a ghost: incorporeal, at risk of fading away on the breath of the breeze. Her costume felt like a big white smudge of nothingness next to a living breathing rainbow.

"Are you coming to the carnival?" Pierrot asked, using the soft sort of tone she used when she was trying to coax a dove to eat from her palm.

The rainbow girl watched her warily for a while longer, then made a movement as though she wanted to touch one of the woollen pompoms on Pierrot's blouse before she changed her mind and slipped both hands into her pockets. "You're in my daddy's field."

"This is my daddy's carnival. If I ask him, he'll let you win a teddy bear even if you don't burst all the balloons."

That made her smile suddenly, and the rainbow beads clicked against each other with a noise like chattering bugs when she shook her head. "That's cheating. I'll win one for real."

* * *

She didn't win a bear that year, or the next. The year after that she won a little goldfish in a plastic bag of water on the hook-a-duck game and named it Gold Star For Effort, grinning sheepishly at herself while her daddy and Pierrot's daddy laughed.

The year after that she didn't play at all, but spent all her pocket money on the whirliest of the rides and a huge pink cloud of candy floss on a stick which she held between herself and Pierrot on the steps of the Hall of Mirrors so they could nibble the sides and meet in the middle.

"I'm gonna get that bear," she said. Her determination was wearing a masquerade mask of nonchalance, which meant it was only half-disguised. "One day. I'll get it."

"I know you will," Pierrot told her. Rainbows always had a pot of gold at the end, everybody knew that. This rainbow had a bear waiting. Pierrot knew it; she could feel it fluttering like firefly wings in her stomach, the same way she sometimes knew which number would turn up next on the roulette stall or which ride would be the next to break down.

"How do you know?"

"Because you said you will."

That seemed to please her. She held the candy floss stick out for Pierrot to take and shuffled a foot closer on the step to rest her head on Pierrot's shoulder. She was thirteen now, with a tie-dyed dress and pink and purple polyester hair clipped into her curls instead of the beads, and Pierrot was thirteen, still dressed in white, still sweating beneath the greasy layer of white face paint she wore every day. Still a ghost trying to befriend a butterfly.

* * *

"I don't know your name," Pierrot said the year after the year after that.

"Columbine," said the rainbow, who was wearing magenta bell bottoms and a grey waistcoat with multi-coloured pinstripes. There was glitter in her hair, twinkling like stars beneath a sky too cloudy to let the real stars show, and a greasy white stain of make-up around her mouth where she'd kissed it from Pierrot's face behind the funhouse.

"Like a dove."

"Is it?" Columbine asked, but she was distracted, didn't really want an answer. Her fingers – nails painted acid green – found the pompom buttons on Pierrot's blouse, and something made Pierrot remember the little girl with vivid amber eyes hiding like a tiger in the long grass. Columbine kissed her again, tongue and teeth, clumsy, and Pierrot thought _she's finally pounced and I'm her prey_. And she thought, _being devoured feels like being happy. You don't learn that on Attenborough_.

* * *

The next year they shared a seat on the Ferris wheel for six circuits and kissed at the top of every one where nobody could see, until Pierrot's dad yelled at her to get back to work.

* * *

The next year Columbine brought a boy with her. They shared a seat on the Ferris wheel for six circuits and kissed all the way around every one of them where everybody could see. His name was Harley; Pierrot knew it was, not because she felt it in her stomach but because that was the name on Columbine's new necklace.

* * *

The next year Columbine won a bear on the balloons game.

There was a trick to making sure people never won except a few times a night: the balloons were never blown up tightly enough and the darts were just a little bit too blunt to do anything except bounce harmlessly off onto the ground. This time Pierrot gave Jack on the stall twenty pounds to blow up the balloons until they were squeaking under the strain of the air they contained, rubber stretched as thin and transparent as the membrane of a cell, and gave Bella Donna from the knife throwing act another twenty pounds to sharpen the darts. Columbine aimed and threw, burst the red, like last year's t-shirt, the yellow and the green, like her headscarf when she was fourteen, the blue, like her electric cobalt dungarees that first day they met.

When she smiled she had a habit of pressing her palms to her cheeks, as though she were afraid the smile might fly off her face entirely and go flapping away into the night like a pearly white, purple-painted bat.

"Nice one, yeah," said Jack, paying more attention to the football scores on his phone than to the noise of the carnival. "You can pick a teddy or one of the—"

"Teddy bear, please," Columbine said, breathless and giddy with delight. "I've only been trying half my life."

Pierrot tried to hide in the shadows of the hot dog van, but that's the awkward thing about being dressed up like a doll and painted glaring white. Hiding in the shadows becomes difficult.

"I won!" Columbine almost yelled. The bear was half as tall as she was. She carried it in front of her in both arms the way Dog Dave carried potato sacks to the chippy van. "Told you I'd win and I wouldn't cheat! Hold his hand, I'll buy you a toffee apple to celebrate."

Pierrot held his hand and Columbine held the other, and they walked up the grass path between the dodgems and the carousel swinging him back and forth the way parents all around them were swinging their over-excited toddlers.

She wanted to tell Columbine the carnival wasn't coming back next year – that her dad was retiring, and she was being sent to work in the fruit market in town because her uncle knew a woman whose daughter knew the guy. She wanted to ask what happened to Harley's necklace, and to Harley. Sort of wanted to confess about the balloons, but not really.

Columbine was wearing black boots, black tights, a black dress, but each step she took ruffled the hem and showed her petticoats: every colour she could find, and one pure white. Pierrot had never noticed before, but in the flashing lights of the carnival even white sometimes looked like a rainbow.

She wondered what Columbine was going to call the bear. Hoped she was happy now.


End file.
